Photo Exhibition Looks at Mexico's African Heritage EFE
go to original September 26, 2012

A woman visits the "Afromexico" photographic exhibition, which is taking place in Mexico City and seeks to shed light on Mexico's communities of African descent. (EFE)

MEXICO CITY - The "Afromexico" photographic exhibition, which is taking place in Mexico City, seeks to shed light on Mexico's communities of African descent, which have been relegated to "invisibility and discrimination," organizers said.

The exhibition, which runs until Oct. 10 at the Foreign Relations Secretariat, features images that highlight "the dignity, the look and the strength" of the communities' members, photographer Paulina Garcia told Efe.

"The project came out of wanting to know these communities," Garcia, who lived with several Afro-Mexican families for five years, said.

The exhibition is one of the events associated with the "Foro Nacional sobre Poblaciones Afrodescendientes en Mexico 2012" (National Forum on Afrodescendant Populations in Mexico 2012), which will take place Oct. 26-27 and seeks to develop a national agenda for the inclusion of these communities.

Afro-Mexican communities exist in a situation of "invisibility" in terms of "historical recognition," National Council to Prevent Discrimination, or Conapred, president Ricardo Bucio told Efe.

"We have historical backwardness on this issue and we have both the possibility and the obligation to implement public policies of recognition, restitution and re-inclusion," Bucio said.

There are around 500,000 Afro-Mexicans, with most of them living in Oaxaca, Guerrero, Veracruz and Chiapas states, the Conapred president said.

Some of their ancestors were brought to Mexico during the colonial period, while others were runaway slaves from the United States who settled in the northern part of the country, Bucio said.

Mexico underwent a "whitening process" in the 19th and 20th centuries that prevented people from learning about the contributions of Afro-Mexican communities to the country's culture, the Conapred president said.

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